Quote from: abcd_z;924671It's your job to cobble together a new proto-D&D to jump-start the RPG movement, but you have to base it on books that have actually been printed. Except for the lack of RPGs and RPG-derived stories, everything else is the same.

Smugglers & Stormtroopers: the Star Wars Roleplaying Game.

Quote from: abcd_z;924671You have been drawn into a bizarre alternate universe where everything is mostly the same, except RPGs don't really exist. Neither do the books that inspired Gygax and Arneson.  Everything in Appendix A no longer exists. No Lord of the Rings books, no Conan the Barbarian stories, and nothing that drew from the landscape that sprung up around D&D.

It's your job to cobble together a new proto-D&D to jump-start the RPG movement, but you have to base it on books that have actually been printed. Except for the lack of RPGs and RPG-derived stories, everything else is the same.

Hmm.. The works of A. Machen, Poe, Verne, Lytton-Bulwer (the Coming Race), J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Camilla, Green Tea), William Hope Hodgson (The Night Land, House on the Borderlands) should lend sufficient inspiration. They are more grim, more Gothic than Appendix N, but still as fantastic.

A lot of those stories deal with consequences of moral failings, and the power of True Love to give you the strength to perservere against the horrors in the night. So I imagine there would be some sort of Conviction stat that allowed you to keep going when things were against you. I can see fighter, magic-user, thief pretty straightforwardly. A lot of priests get eaten by relying on their false faith. It's arguable whether it is the faith or what they believe in is false. There are some circumstances when Father O'Malley hobbles forward and nobly holds off the fae monstrosity with the power of Christ. Well, just long enough for the young couple to escape and collapse the cave entrance, anyway. There would undoubtedly be some sort of corruption stat for the magic-users.

English-language pop culture, and the fantasy genre in particular, would look so different in an ATL where D&D didn't come out in 1974 that I don't even know where I'd start.

Quote from: The Butcher;926944English-language pop culture, and the fantasy genre in particular, would look so different in an ATL where D&D didn't come out in 1974 that I don't even know where I'd start.

Agreed. All the people who base their social identity on the hatred of D&D...what the hell else would they have chosen to waste their lives on?  It boggles the mind.

Plus, Vin Diesel would have been nowhere near as cool.

Quote from: CRKrueger;926945Agreed. All the people who base their social identity on the hatred of D&D...what the hell else would they have chosen to waste their lives on?  It boggles the mind.

Hating something else, probably rock music.

A world without D&D is easily conceivable. But for none of the original inspirations to exist would require the entirety of North American popular culture to be almost unguessably different. As frame in the original post, I don't think this question can be meaningfully answered.

Well I'm Late to the party mostly do to spending so much time probing the depths of this idea.
As such I think there are a few things that didn't get brought up that are rather likely.

Now if someone wanted to make a dnd alike in A world as purposed it seems to me that Disney would end up being a major influence. If we look at Disney meany of the pieces that make up A dnd like game are there though not in A familiar form in meany cases. From Disney we can get the fighter type as seen  in the likes of Sleeping Beauty and the sword in the stone. We can also gain magic both by birth and by study as seen in frozen and The Sword in The Stone which would not be hard to turn in to a magic user of one from or other.  From Aladdin and Tangled we can get the thief. Now here's where things get A little tricky. While the idea of healing magic does exist in Disney it is both #1 much rarer and #2 not the sort of thing that's usable during a fight as evidenced in Tangled.
There are a number of things that could be lifted from the Disney faeries line as well.

Now we do have most of the major pieces all that's left is to fill in with some bits and bobs from older tails.
Such as goblins and most of the monster list.

So what do the rest of you think?

I agree: I think that we'd have more of a focus on Fairy Tales and world myths and legends. Plenty of sword-, bow- and spear-wielding heroes and heroines to emulate. Perhaps we'd have ended up with more diverse interpretations of "elves" than the usual tall, thin, beautiful immortals that dominate the universal perception.

Quote from: Necrozius;928199Perhaps we'd have ended up with more diverse interpretations of "elves" than the usual tall, thin, beautiful immortals that dominate the universal perception.

TSR D&D Elves weren't tall, on average they were shorter than humans. Did WotC change that?

Quote from: Bren;928214TSR D&D Elves weren't tall, on average they were shorter than humans. Did WotC change that?

Oops, no, you're right, actually. They're shorter.

Quote from: Necrozius;928221Oops, no, you're right, actually. They're shorter.

Yeah, no idea why Gary (I assume it was Gary) decided to minimize his elves. Personally I like the taller elves of Tolkien as that allows elves to literally look down on most of humanity. See also Moorcock's Melniboneans.

Quote from: Bren;928239Yeah, no idea why Gary (I assume it was Gary) decided to minimize his elves. Personally I like the taller elves of Tolkien as that allows elves to literally look down on most of humanity. See also Moorcock's Melniboneans.

Yeah my idea of elves was especially molded from Moorcock and Games Workshop, actually. Other than the main protagonists' tribe in Elfquest, I pictured elves to be taller.

I was under the impression the main inspiration for D&D elves (besides Tolkien) was Poul Anderson.

Quote from: TristramEvans;928253I was under the impression the main inspiration for D&D elves (besides Tolkien) was Poul Anderson.

Probably Three Hearts and Three Lions and the Broken Sword. I don't think those elves/faerie folk were any shorter than humans, but I honestly can't recall whether Anderson described their height in detail.

Judging from the Halloween costume parade at my son's elementary school, there would be no 'fantasy' roleplaying at all - the first rpg would be about superheroes or Star Wars.

There was one girl dressed as a Viking from How to Train Your Dragon and one honest-to-goodness pointy-hatted, long-bearded wizard, but other than that, tons of Captain Americas, Wonder Women, Batgirls and Supergirls, plus a number of Reys and a bunch of Kylo Rens, Vaders, and stormtroopers - my son said he only saw one X-wing pilot, all the other boys were Imperials.

Surprisingly there were no Finns, Jakes, or PeeBees this year.